Nivi Manchanda - Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge

Imagining Afghanistan

Over time and across different genres, Afghanistan has been presented to the world as potential ally, dangerous enemy, gendered space and mysterious locale. These powerful, if competing, visions seek to make sense of Afghanistan and to render it legible. In this innovative examination, Nivi Manchanda uncovers and critically explores Anglophone practices of knowledge cultivation and representational strategies and argues that Afghanistan occupies a distinctive place in the imperial imagination: over-determined and under-theorised, owing largely to the particular history of imperial intervention in the region. Focusing on representations of gender, state and tribes, Manchanda re-historicises and de-mythologises the study of Afghanistan through a sustained critique of colonial forms of knowing and demonstrates how the development of pervasive tropes in Western conceptions of Afghanistan have enabled Western intervention, invasion and bombing in the region from the nineteenth century to the present.

Nivi Manchanda is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include post-colonial theory, histories of race and empire, and gender studies. She is co-editor of Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (2014) and currently serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Politics .

For nana, and in loving memory of nani

Contents

Figures

Acknowledgements

In an interview Fred Moten once intimated that if we think something (a piece of music, a painting, a text) belongs to an individual, it is probably because we didnt look closely enough. One need not read between the lines to realise that this book too is a product of what academics increasingly label co-production. It emerges out of an industry renowned for its practices of appropriation, expropriation, silencing and discrediting, and as such it is implicated in those invariably racialised, gendered and classed processes of knowledge production. But it is also a product of intellectual community, political solidarity and enduring friendships.

In the past ten years I have amassed innumerable debts: from the early days of my PhD, I had the active and invaluable support of Duncan Bell and Tarak Barkawi at the University of Cambridge. In London, many brilliant generations of PhD students based at the LSE read drafts, shared insights and drinks and made an indelible impact on the project. I am lucky to be able to call Charmaine Chua, Ali Howell, Kerem Nisanioglu, Olivia Rutazibwa, Jesse Crane-Seeber, Paul Kirby, Michael Bloomfield, Kathryn Fisher, Melanie Richter-Montpetit, Rahul Rao, Akanksha Mehta, Ida Roland Birkvad, Kelly-Jo Bluen and Kate Millar my friends, and their influence can be felt palpably on the pages of Imagining Afghanistan. Martin Bayly, Jonathan Ludvig and Kurt Jacobsen read the manuscript in full, and the book is a much stronger piece of scholarship for it. I owe special thanks to James Eastwood and Chris Rossdale for their close reading of countless drafts, hours of conversation and general ability to discuss the minutiae of this project from its inception to its completion. Words will not do justice to how much I have learned from them over the years, and how much I value their friendship. Lisa Tilley and Sara Salem have been sources of untold wisdom, wit and warmth, and their confidence in this project was often infectious enough for me to overcome my own lingering doubts about it. They have shaped my thinking profoundly, and I hope this book is worthy of their faith in me. There are far more people some of them close friends, others whose brilliance Ive only encountered fleetingly at conferences who have had some input on Imagining Afghanistan than I can thank in this space. I hope they will forgive me for their absence, which is only an absence on paper.